Showing posts with label Avoidable Harm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Avoidable Harm. Show all posts

Fascism? Wealth-as-Power is a cultural invention.

Fascism?




1. Wealth-as-Power is a cultural invention.

2. Wealth-as-Power is where accumulated wealth operates as a dominant political force.

3. From war lords to monarchies to states, wherever a minority extracts wealth from the majority through exploitation, and accumulates that wealth over generations and controls it through inheritance they have to build a political force that protects the wealth extraction and the accumulated wealth from being held accountable for the avoidable harms of the exploitation that extracts the wealth by the populations that are exploited.

4. Wealth Extraction through exploitation is inherently unjust precisely because it causes avoidable harms and rejects being held accountable, rejects prevention of avoidable harms.

5. This hurts people. This injures people. This kills people.

6. Fascism is one formation of this system.

7. Western Liberal Democracies are another formation.

8. Fascism directs its violence internally and in the open when the exploited home population becomes too restive.

9. Western Liberal Democracies have always directed the violence externally - Colonialism and neoColonialism serve to maintain dominance over Global South raw materials and cheap labour as assets, through corruption and the creation of vassal state politics.

10. As Western populations have become much more aware of the avoidable harms not avoided, as we have become more aware of the vast harms caused across the Global South, as we have become more aware of the history of Colonialism as Capitalist Business model, we have become more restive.

11. Climate Disruption is a key element in this, in that most people understand now that the Fossil Fuel wealth holders understood the implications of pouring CO2 into the atmosphere more than 70 years ago, and chose not to avoid that avoidable harm.

12. Because we understand this, we have the receipts, we have enough evidence to demand the Wealth Holders be held accountable, because they are culpable and thus liable.

13. Wealth Holders are entwined into every major industrial sector through shareholding, via hedge funds. They operate as a global political lobby to protect their wealth and power. They corrupt legislators, they influence populations through media.

14. Wealth-as-Power saw the awakening that emerged in the 1990s as the internet grew, as information and analysis formerly limited to academics started to percolate out into the population, and they saw that the population became more active in campaigning.

15. Wealth-as-Power created 'think tanks' to counter that campaigning and to write legislation their corrupted pet legislators then put into law.

16. Wealth-as-Power invested huge funding to take over and expand control of news media and online media to counter that campaigning with Cognitive Warfare to disrupt grass roots activism in every arena, including campaigning that co-opted grass roots activism.

17. TERFs are one example of this co-option. Women in military combat teams, Women as CEOs of Corporate Power, Women behaving within the Patriarchy Wealth System as equals to the men already in place. The Trad Wives, the Manopshere, Climate Denial, the new Cold War, Conspiracy Theoryism, New Age Spiritual Fascism. All of these are Cognitive Warfare campaigns.

18. As those campaigns failed to deter grass roots activism which has grown more analytical skills with each regeneration, Wealth-as-Power has decided that full throated Fascism is now their optimal choice to evade accountability. Wealth-as-Power is fully engaged in a war against Democratic Legislative Accountability.

19. They cannot allow the population to gain traction through democratic legislative process to hold them accountable - they cannot allow us to hold Blair and Bush et all indictable for War Crimes. They cannot allow us to hold the fossil fuel wealth holders accountable for climate denialism.

20. They are marshalling misogyny and poverty as a utility to weaponise young men, as a divisive strategy, to become a new generation of patriarchy conditioned men. Setting men against women against men. The tool in this dynamic is cognitive warfare

21. They are marshalling Race and Racism and poverty as a utility to weaponise Europeans against all non-Europeans. The anti-immigrant movement is populated with people from relatively deprived sectors and communities of European populations. The tool in this dynamic is cognitive warfare.

22. They know that they cannot groom the entire population, so they are hoping to groom just enough people to sow chaos, to divide the electorates and to populate militia and other forces that can be deployed.

24. However, they have made an immense strategic error - they have revealed themselves, shown us who they really are, and they remain a minority, albeit a wealthy and well armed minority. The mask has been removed. The veil is off. The steel fist is revealed. They cannot hide. They are the minority.

25. Countering this will not be easy yet in the longer term, over two or three generations, it will be successful if we hold firm, build solidarity, act rationally and collectively and politically in our best interests and the best interests of all our children.

26. The best each generation can do is to do the work we can do so that our children do not have to do what we neglected to do, and they can then concentrate on what they must do to move this forwards.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received




#folkmusic
#singersongwriter
#blogger
#music

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too.  UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..



Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.


BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?


Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to *peak your interest, dear reader. 


*(A dear reader pointed out my spelling error, I used the incorrect word. I ought to have used 'pique' - thank you Bernie Hastie on Facebook...) 


I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.


This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'. 


To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters. 


Reading Mo Stewart's Paper will, I believe,  inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.


It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often. 


https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf


Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract


"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work. 


This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments. 


I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.


Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment


Introduction


The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs. 


Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).


Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state. 


Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.


Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis


The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) . 


The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).


Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need. 


The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."


~


https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...


~


In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well. 


Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms


I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population. 


Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius - .mp3 songs

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous - .wav Songs

https://www.corneilius.net - Archive

#folkmusic
#singersongwriter
#blogger
#music